Upon the failure of the Confederate experiment, President Lincoln, in spite of the bitter and threatening hostility to him of a number of the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party in and out of Congress, wisely and consistently determined to adhere to the position involved in Judge Black’s opinion that the constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government could not be and had not been shaken by the contest. After the Confederate Government had abandoned Richmond, he visited that capital as President of the United States, and in words made pathetic and historical by the deplorable and senseless crime which was so soon to shock the country and the civilised world, proclaimed his intention to administer the Government “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” In his last public speech, delivered on the 11th of April, 1865, two days only before his assassination, he spoke of the seceded States as already restored to their places in the Union, and said of them in his quaint and homely fashion that, “finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had been abroad.” Mr. Gideon Welles of Connecticut, to whom the portfolio of the Navy had been given by President Lincoln in his first Cabinet, as a representative of the Democratic wing of the then newly-organized “Republican” party, tells us that at a Cabinet meeting held on the last day of President Lincoln’s life, April 13, 1865, the President urged all the members of the Cabinet to exert their influence to get all the State Governments of the lately seceded States of the South “going again before the annual meeting of Congress in December.” This meant, of course, that President Lincoln intended and expected the lately seceded States to send to Washington their proper and constitutional quota of senators and representatives freely elected under the local franchise in each of those States. His purpose was to secure the ratification by the seceded States of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery formally, and then to accept them as in all respects States within the Union. In the Emancipation Proclamation of the 22nd of September, 1862, which President Lincoln had issued avowedly as a war measure, he had taken pains to declare that his object in prosecuting the war as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy” of the United States, was, had been, and would be, “practically to restore the constitutional relation between the United States and each of the States and the people thereof in which that relation was or might be suspended.” This was not at all the object of the unscrupulous and reckless leaders who took command of the “Republican” party upon the death of President Lincoln, and under whom Mr. Blaine first made a figure upon the field of Federal politics.